Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Good programmers learn more from "That's not what I expected!" than from getting it right the first time.
Anonymous
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
Richard Feynman
One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan J. Perlis
When a professional race car driver races, his pulse gets lower and he relaxes.
Jun-ichiro Hagino
When I code it is the same thing.
The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
John Carmack on software patents
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Alan Kay
Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.
Niklaus Wirth
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging.
Fred Brooks
The eleventh commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.
Alan J. Perlis